Thomas Babington Macaulay, On John Dryden (1828)
Misattributed
On John Dryden (1828)
“Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”
"As I Please," Tribune (28 April 1944) https://books.google.com/books?id=fCRLPIbLP8IC&pg=PA133&dq=%22it+is+almost+impossible+to+think+without+talking%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjZi9qjndzZAhURrVkKHbDDCxkQ6AEILjAB#v=onepage&q=%22it%20is%20almost%20impossible%20to%20think%20without%20talking%22&f=false
"As I Please" (1943–1947)
Context: The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense, because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking.... Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.
“American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.”
Address to New York Cultural League (6 May 1969)
Source: The development of intelligence in children, 1916, p. 42-43
Source: Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Section A (1910), p. 290. ; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 184): Mathematics as a fine art.
“This is then another new faculty which might exist only potentially in matter, like all the others”
Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
Context: [W]e must admit, with the same frankness, that we are ignorant whether matter has in itself the faculty of feeling, or only the power of acquiring it by those modifications or forms to which matter is susceptible; for it is true that this faculty of feeling appears only in organic bodies.
This is then another new faculty which might exist only potentially in matter, like all the others which have been mentioned; and this was the hypothesis of the ancients, whose philosophy, full of insight and penetration, deserves to be raised above the ruins of the philosophy of the moderns.<!--p.160
“Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own.”
This Business of Living (1935-1950)
From a list of insults drafted by A E Housman, and posthumously published in Laurence Housman's A. E. H. (1937) pp. 89-90. The name was left blank in the original, but was intended to be filled in and used when a suitable subject should turn up.
Dune Genesis (1980)
Context: Don't give over all of your critical faculties to people in power, no matter how admirable those people may appear to be. Beneath the hero's facade you will find a human being who makes human mistakes. Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero. And sometimes you run into another problem.
It is demonstrable that power structures tend to attract people who want power for the sake of power and that a significant proportion of such people are imbalanced — in a word, insane. … Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
It is the systems themselves that I see as dangerous.
